Seth Wenig / The Associated PressA firefighter looks at the memorial waterfalls at the National September 11 Memorial in New York.

By Gustav Niebuhr,
Contributing writer

Today — and for years to come — the public will take the measure of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City. From pictures I’ve seen, master planner Daniel Libeskind’s creation should assume a significance alongside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a place of American remembrance and reflection.

But national shrines call us to more than mourning. I hope the names of men and women inscribed on the September 11 Memorial’s walls inspire us to continue a singularly positive reaction that resulted from that atrocity. Ten years ago — amidst the national trauma wrought by al-Qaida, a network of murderers who claimed to be acting as Muslims — many Americans reached out to one another, across religious lines, to sustain democratic, civil society. In cities and towns, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and agnostics rallied to protect American Muslim mosques, schools and homes. Extraordinary? Yes, that and more.

Those actions expressed a profound faith in America as a pluralistic society, in the founding idea of the United States as a country of many groups forged into a single nation. Conversations followed those actions. Community groups formed, as those Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and agnostics got to know one another. They met in living rooms, sometimes in houses of worship, over coffee, asking questions, confronting stereotypes.

Their response foiled a central goal of the terrorists (indeed, all terrorists), who wanted to turn us against one another, to shatter our society, to corrode our best instincts with brutal fear.

My own Sept. 11 began as my days then often did, by boarding an 8 a.m. New Jersey Transit train, in Princeton Junction. But this time, that trip included a singular, horrific view through the east-facing windows an hour later, as the train dashed across the Meadowlands, giving its astonished passengers an unobstructed sight of the World Trade Center ablaze. I worked as a reporter at The New York Times’ national desk. That morning, and in days to come, I braced myself to cover the mayhem I felt sure would follow, as some among my fellow countrymen, overwhelmed with grief and outrage, turned their anger on citizens they thought might somehow resemble Osama bin Laden — “Muslim terrorists,” as a popular phrase put it. And some incidents of “backlash” occurred.

But what so impressed me when I learned of them later — and continues to impress me now — was the individual decisions made by many Americans to take the opposite tack, to include the 4 million or 5 million Muslims living among them who had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks. Across the United States — Syracuse very much included — community groups based on interfaith discussion and action came into being. Some lasted weeks, others exist still.

I grew up in an era when people warned against publicly discussing religion. Off the table, they said — along with money and politics. But that time is long past; religion must be discussed, if we are to be fully educated about our fellow citizens. We need to know what others really believe, how they interpret their texts and how their faith shapes their lives. We need to know so we can pierce the stereotypes and suspicions that threaten to divide the overwhelmingly peaceful majorities among us. We need to
know as a civic responsibility. We need to be able to recognize a demagogue for what he is when he attempts to wring poison from dogma.

Mass terror takes many forms, some political, some ethnic, some based on economic theory, some starkly racist. I’ve read my fill of news stories about the Red Brigades; the Baader-Meinhoff Gang; the Ku Klux Klan; Timothy McVeigh and — in July — Anders Breivik, a Norwegian alleged to have gunned down nearly 100 young people. Norwegian police called him a “Christian terrorist” — as jarring a conjunction of words as I have seen in a long time.

Terror is democracy’s enemy; terror despises human rights. But opposing terror is not simply for the military. Among us civilians, it demands a commitment to search for the common ethic among people you do not know. Does it mean risk-taking? Yes. And sometimes being disappointed, even disillusioned? Yes, again.

It seems to me no accident that the 9/11 Memorial should be dedicated at nearly the same time as a monument to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is unveiled on the Washington Mall. Writing from an Alabama jail, King described humanity as “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Later, he preached at Riverside Church in Manhattan: “When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response ... Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door that leads to ultimate reality.”

Memorials — like the one to King and the men and women of 9/11 — speak not simply of our loss, but of unfinished business. You find that in the greatest memorial oration delivered on American soil. In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the responsibility that belonged to those who had survived. “It is for us the living ...” he said, to whom falls the task of re-building, after great, unanticipated violence.

Post-9/11, I commuted to and from Manhattan, daily struck dumb by the terrible cloud rising into the crystalline sky above Lower Manhattan. Boiling up from the burning ruins, it carried aloft the ashes of 3,000 people — daughters and sons, mothers and fathers; individuals of every race, color, ethnicity; people of every imaginable religious faith (yes, American Muslims, too), and those who shunned any religious identity.

Those “honored dead” (to borrow Lincoln’s phrase) deserve their memorial — but not simply a physical one. They deserve our dedication to fight terror’s ultimate goal, the destruction of civil society. They deserve the effort we can muster against fear and stereotyping and in support of education about one another.

The French existentialist Albert Camus (no sentimentalist, he!) wrote after World War II that humanity faces a choice between violence and dialogue.

Gustav Niebuhr

The former may have a far better chance of success, he said, but the path of honor lies in holding to the bet that words are stronger than bullets.

About the writer
Gustav Niebuhr is associate professor of Newspaper and Online Journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. He also teaches in the Religion Department and is director of the Religion and Society Program in the College of Arts & Sciences. He is the author of “Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America” (Viking Press). During his 30-year journalism career, Niebuhr covered religion for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times.